Escape unescaped characters in XML with Python

Question

I need to escape special characters in an invalid XML file which is about 5000 lines long. Here's an example of the XML that I have to deal with:

<root>
 <element>
  <name>name & surname</name>
  <mail>name@name.org</mail>
 </element>
</root>

Here the problem is the character "&" in the name. How would you escape special characters like this with a Python library? I didn't find a way to do it with BeautifulSoup.

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

10

If you don't care about invalid characters in the xml you could use XML parser's recover option (see Parsing broken XML with lxml.etree.iterparse):

from lxml import etree

parser = etree.XMLParser(recover=True) # recover from bad characters.
root = etree.fromstring(broken_xml, parser=parser)
print etree.tostring(root)

Output

<root>
<element>
<name>name  surname</name>
<mail>name@name.org</mail>
</element>
</root>

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

1
1

answered Feb 14 '11 at 21:25

jfs

399,953
195
994
1,670

2

finally i used the parse method from lxml.html.soupparser : it can parse my ugly xml without crying :) Thanks for your answer – Jérôme Pigeot Feb 16 '11 at 15:47
2

This answer, while useful, won't escape the unescaped characters. It will apparently simply drop them. – Asclepius Aug 11 '19 at 14:03

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 14 '11 at 19:02

You're probably just wanting to do some simple regexp-ery on the HTML before throwing it into BeautifulSoup.

Even simpler, if there aren't any SGML entities (&...;) in the code, html=html.replace('&','&') will do the trick.

Otherwise, try this:

x ="<html><h1>Fish & Chips & Gravy</h1><p>Fish &amp; Chips &#x0026; Gravy</p>"
import re
q=re.sub(r'&([^a-zA-Z#])',r'&amp;\1',x)
print q

Essentially the regex looks for & not followed by alpha-numeric or # characters. It won't deal with ampersands at the end of lines, but that's probably fixable.

Asclepius · Answer 3 · 2019-08-13T15:41:26.377

This answer provides XML sanitizer functions, although they don't escape the unescaped characters, but simply drop them instead.

Using bs4 with lxml

The question wondered how to do it with Beautiful Soup. Here is a function which will sanitize a small XML bytes object with it. It was tested with the package requirements beautifulsoup4==4.8.0 and lxml==4.4.0. Note that lxml is required here by bs4.

import xml.etree.ElementTree

import bs4


def sanitize_xml(content: bytes) -> bytes:
    # Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57450722/
    try:
        xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(content)
    except xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError:
        return bs4.BeautifulSoup(content, features='lxml-xml').encode()
    return content  # already valid XML

Using only lxml

Obviously there is not much of a point in using both bs4 and lxml when this can be done with lxml alone. This lxml==4.4.0 using sanitizer function is essentially derived from the answer by jfs.

import lxml.etree


def sanitize_xml(content: bytes) -> bytes:
    # Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57450722/
    try:
        lxml.etree.fromstring(content)
    except lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError:
        root = lxml.etree.fromstring(content, parser=lxml.etree.XMLParser(recover=True))
        return lxml.etree.tostring(root)
    return content  # already valid XML

score -1 · Answer 4 · edited Mar 02 '15 at 17:18

-1

<name>name & surname</name>

is not well-formed XML. It should be:

<name>name &amp; surname</name>

All conformant XML tools should create this - you normally do not have to worry. If you create a string with the '&' character then an XML tool will output the escaped version. If you create the string by hand it is your responsibility to make sure it is escaped. If you use an XML editor it should escape it for you.

If the file has been given you by someone else, send it back and tell them it is not well-formed. If they no longer exist you will have to use a plain text editor. That's fragile and messy but there is no other way. If the file has ampersands elsewhere that are used for escaping then the file is garbage.

See a 10-year-old post here and a later one here.

edited Mar 02 '15 at 17:18

Kimbluey

1,199
2
12
23

answered Feb 11 '11 at 17:50

peter.murray.rust

37,407
44
153
217

the xml is generated by a novell tool called **metamig** : it exports the trustees from a **nss server**: there are folders with the & character so i have to escape all thoses ones to parse correctly the file – Jérôme Pigeot Feb 11 '11 at 17:57
Assuning you have quoted it correctly it's PSEUDO-xml. I don't know this tool but if you have reported it correctly it should never have got out. It's just WRONG. And if you pay money for it, demand your money back. – peter.murray.rust Feb 11 '11 at 18:01
Thank you peter, I didn't know the '&' should be escaped in a correct XML file. You saved me a research on why Python ElementTree didn't show the '&' character – lorenzo Oct 30 '19 at 10:10

Escape unescaped characters in XML with Python

4 Answers4

Output

Using bs4 with lxml

Using only lxml

Linked